I’ve blogged before on the fundamental stories of Western culture, so I’ll just mention them briefly here.  They’re important to invoke in your presentations because we all respond to them – that’s why they’re fundamental. 

If you ask your employees to embark with you on a long and arduous journey to develop a new product, they’ll complain about the obstacles along the way, unless you invoke a Quest story.  Then, the obstacles are to be expected because that’s what happens on a quest.  The heroes (your audience) meets obstacles and suffers reversals – but eventually overcomes them all to reach the goal.  Don't make the mistake of casting yourself as the lone hero — always bring the audience along with you.  

The Quest story is the basic one, and audiences get the idea very quickly because the story is so deeply ingrained in our psyches.  Quest stories have heroes, journeys, obstacles, mentors, and most importantly a goal at the end.  For more information on the subject, read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the definitive book on the subject.   There are many others that take the idea and apply it to writing, scriptwriting, and so on.  Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, is a good example.  For more detail on how to apply these ideas to speeches, see my book, Working the Room, reprinted in paper as Give Your Speech, Change the World. 

After the Quest, the other stories are:  Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Story, Rags to Riches, and Revenge.  There are other theories that offer more stories, but I’ve always found the other ones to be kinds of Quests, and so I stick to these five.  Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is an example of one of the other theories, but his book seems to me to make the whole business more complicated than it needs to be.  He says he spent 30 years writing the book, and maybe that’s the problem. 

The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech.  You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a Stranger in a Strange Land story in order to bring the audience into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that ‘you’re on a quest’.  It’s better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a space where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story. 

Once you’ve picked your thematic story and you’re off on a Quest or you’re all Strangers in a Strange Land, then you want to think about using archetypes to get further storytelling mileage out of our common mythology.  I’ll talk about those next time.